This is a great story of 'getting a programming microcontroller from Northern Software (Buy), add the components (Make) and use the software ( Use).

Buy: William Roth (Bill) one of the senior developers of Great Cow BASIC recently ordered several  5v Northern Software programming microcontrollers.  The whole project cost less then $10 USD.

Make: The project was simple, taking less than an hour. You need some skills to assemble and solder the components. 

Use:  Bill put a Northern Software programmer microcontroller  on a bread board and connected it up as per the diagrams on the Northern Software  website and connected it to a PIC18F25K42.  Installed and started the NSPROG application, selected the hex source file to program the PIC18F25K42 with, and hit the "Program" button.   Wow!! His words.

Instead of taking the usual 20 seconds to program a PIC using a PicKit3 programmer using MPLAB IPE,  programming was completed in less than 0.3 seconds.   That is more than 50 times faster and he no longer has time to refill his coffee, (or plant a new garden...) while waiting for the PIC to be programmed.

There are software options to programmer a PIC microcontroller with Northern Software - the user interface software and a command line utility.  The command line utility can be used with Great Cow BASIC so that one click PIC programming (Hex/Flash) can be used from the Great Cow BASIC IDE . 

For a more details on using the Northern Software programmer  with Great Cow BASIC please see  the forum at this link